Slain runaway caught in 2 worlds

Texas girl troubled by issues of race

At 15, Sahara Moorer was tall, smart and beautiful, the daughter of a black father and a white mother.

She was also a deeply troubled runaway, haunted by questions of race and her place in the world, her family and friends say.

"Over the last few months she was having an identity crisis," her maternal grandmother, Meleney Kienle, said Tuesday from the El Paso, Texas, home she shared with Moorer. "One minute she wanted green contact lenses. The next she stopped wearing them because she said they made her look too white."

Two weeks ago, Moorer ran away for the last time.

Police say she was raped and strangled Sunday in Chicago after attending a Sweetest Day party. On Tuesday, a 29-year-old South Side auto mechanic was charged with first-degree murder and aggravated criminal sexual assault in the girl's death and was ordered held without bond.

Baruch Shaw of the 6100 block of South Evans Avenue stood in court shaking his head as a prosecutor detailed for Associate Judge Neil Linehan the allegations against him.

In El Paso, Moorer's family made funeral arrangements.

"We're trying to figure out how to get her home," her grandmother said.

They are also trying to understand what happened to the girl her grandmother called "our precious Sahara." Her parents broke up before she was born. She lived with her mother, her little brother and her grandmother in El Paso. Her father, who she rarely saw, lived in Los Angeles. In the past few months, she ran away several times, telling her close friend, Shay Mundy, that she felt unloved by her white relatives.

"She said she thought I was prejudiced because I didn't like her music," Kienle said. "I said, `Honey, what parent likes their teenager's music?' It was rap music."

Her family thought she was going through normal teenage angst, made slightly worse, perhaps, by issues of race and identity.

Recently, Moorer began expanding her circle of friends to include a rougher crowd--"bad kids," her grandmother said. She also began hanging out with older teenagers. One of them persuaded Moorer to go with her to Chicago.

For years, Moorer spent a month every summer with her father's family in Milwaukee, a place filled with uncles and cousins and black culture. Back home in El Paso, only 2 percent of the 2,600 students at her high school are African-American.

She was especially close to her father's mother, Nancy Moorer.

"They were close big time," her paternal grandfather, Gilbert Moorer, said. "Nancy was her rock."

Then a year and a half ago, Nancy Moorer died and "Sahara began to drift a little bit," he said.

Sahara Moorer was a good athlete. She played basketball and ran track at Hanks High School. During her freshman year, she made A's and B's and was well-liked, according to her assistant principal, Paul Covey.

But something began to change this year. She started ditching class and running away from home. She also began counseling.

A few days ago, she boarded a bus in El Paso and headed east.

"She was trying to get here, she wasn't supposed to be in Chicago," her grandfather said. "She called me on Saturday morning and said come get me grandpa, but I couldn't make it then."

According to Assistant State's Atty. Eileen Murphy, Moorer was standing with two friends outside a West Side lounge when she and Shaw struck up a conversation. She agreed to get into Shaw's car even though her friends warned against it.

They drove to Washington Park, where Shaw and the girl allegedly engaged in what appeared to be consensual sex that turned rough and then deadly when Moorer began to resist, the prosecutor said.